Goodbye Sunshine

I pull my chair up to the window and stare at the last snowfall planet Earth would ever see. How ironic it was that the first snowfall in decades here in the southernmost continent on Earth would also be the last snowfall. Ever. Even now, other than this small area of land at the bottom of the world, the rest of the planet is a scorched wasteland. In a strange way, this snowfall is both beautiful and horribly ugly at the same time.

For the last two hundred and twelve years, everyone knew what was going to happen. Ever since the wandering dark star was first detected at the edge of our solar system, and its meandering path plotted, we knew that our solar system was doomed. There was no way around it and no way to stop it. The dark star was going to get close enough to consume a large percentage of the solar output and radiation from our sun, and that meant the end of our solar system and everything in it. And even worse, as the dark star drifted closer to the sun, Earth’s orbit would take it right through that radiation stream each year.

I have to admit, as I’m sitting here in looking out the window at the gently falling snow, it’s hard to believe that it’s almost over. Our sun, now only producing a fraction of the light and radiation that it did two hundred years ago, is elongated as the corona and chromosphere are being drawn off by the gravity of ASL-475569. At least that’s what the science geeks decided to call it. Some folks decided that it should have an easier name, and they settled on Perdition. I’m not sure who first decided it should be called Perdition, but it fits. The word originally meant ‘utter destruction’, and that’s exactly what is happening to everything in our solar system.  It finally became so ubiquitous that everyone just refers to it as it. That’s all that’s needed; everyone knows what ‘it’ means.

The astronomers first noticed that there was a tremendous disruption as they peered at the Kuiper Belt through their telescopes. There was a large section that suddenly started to go crazy. Objects began shooting in different directions as their orbits were disrupted.

Fortunately, the gas giants took a lot of the impacts of the Kuiper Belt objects. But they couldn’t be everywhere all the time, and there were several that made it to the inner planets. One of the objects was a dwarf planet that managed to get as far as the sun. The day that it crashed into the sun was the day that Mercury was destroyed. The flare that was created caught the edge of the smallest planet, and Mercury disintegrated into thousands of chunks of burned-out rock that were eventually sucked into the sun. The solar flare was the largest ever recorded. Not that anyone would be around much longer to dwell on that little piece of history.

When I was born, Saturn and Neptune were gone, the gasses that made up their atmosphere sucked off into space by the its gravity. What was left of Uranus had been pulled out of orbit and flung into space; no longer part of our solar system. It became a wandering planet, a hobo of the galaxy with nowhere to call home. 

Its gravity was also pulling the outer layers of gas away from Jupiter. I’ve read that Jupiter was once the largest planet in the solar system, but now is only four times the size of Earth.

And that’s when it began to pull the solar radiation and heat away from the sun. For a time during each orbit around the sun, Earth stood right in the middle of stream of radiation and heat that was being pulled away, and after a few years most of Earth ended up being a charred husk. Ironically, the area on Earth that was too cold for humans to live wound up being the last temperate zone for almost half a century. All of the snow melted from Antarctica, and some of the people who were left slowly began to migrate here. Only a handful of us refugees actually made it. And then as our sun is in its death throes, the cold, and now the snow, finally returned.

It’s time to watch the final festivities. I drag a chair to the window and look outside. I think…yeah, this should be a good place to watch. I estimate that we have just a few hour , left but certainly no more than a day. Then it’s sayonara. Adios amigos. Bye y’all. That’s All Folks! That makes the Looney Tunes theme song start running through my head, and I’m not sure that I want to die with that as the last thing I think about. And make no mistake, anyone who didn’t get selected for the Divinity ships will die.

The Divinity ships? Oh, I guess I should also explain those. Forty-seven years ago, ships began taking people who had won the lottery on their trip to new solar systems. It was called the Savior Project, and it was designed to prevent the extinction of humans. For all I know, it may have worked. But all one hundred thousand, four hundred fifty-two people are still out there somewhere, all destined for new, unexplored planets. I predict that many of them will never awaken from stasis, their ships turned into flying coffins forever destined to sail through the galaxy. Some of the ships may survive and may land on a planet somewhere. What we don’t know is if those planets already have civilizations living on them, and if they do, they may not be willing to welcome of a shipload of alien refugees who want to move in like an uninvited in-law.

There were a total of fourteen Divinity Ships. The first nine launched without any issues. But the final five were a madhouse of people trying save themselves. After the launch of the ninth ship, it became clear that if people hadn’t been selected, there was no way they were going to get off Earth. Staying behind condemned them to death. There were a lot of folks that just couldn’t accept that.

And just as predicted, most of them are now dead. There was a group of just over a thousand, myself included, who recognized that Antarctica would be our last stand on Earth. We banded together and made our way here thirty-four years ago. We were lucky, several million others tried to get here once the rest of the Earth started to succumb to its effects, but none made it through. By that time the ocean wasn’t navigable, and all those folks who weren’t already here were either drowned or cooked. Which is just as well. There aren’t enough resources here to sustain them; it barely sustains the few of us that made it.

The one consensus among us Antarctica residents is the sense of real freedom. There’s no future for us. There’s nothing to plan for. We don’t have to worry about having enough money for retirement. We don’t need to worry about our health. There’s no medical coverage, no vacations to plan, no job to go to, no bills to pay, and no future to dream about. It really is mentally liberating, so much so that it has caused quite a few people to go off the deep end. And in an odd twist of fate, those of us left envy those who managed to end their own existence. We just don’t have what it takes to go out like that.

I seriously thought about it. All I would have had to do was step out at the right time, and it would have been all over for me. After all, what did I have to live for? What do any of us have to live for? While she didn’t end her life by her own hand, I still envy her. She now knows what’s on the other side, and I hope that when I arrive she’s waiting for me.

**********

I met Sunshine in church. We both came from backgrounds that didn’t include much in the way of religion, but like me, she decided that if there was some sort of eternal salvation, with everything that was going on, it was worth looking into. We met in a Catholic church and we both decided that it didn’t satisfy our needs. We tried several others: Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, Bahia. Even something called the Mami Wata, where we were required to worship a water spirit while naked, and then pledge our loyalty to the spirit. We left the world of religion wet, but no more enlightened than we had been when we first started exploring it. We decided that religion didn’t give us the peace that we had craved, so we decided to move on.

Sunshine was the one true love of my life. Her name fit her perfectly; when she walked into a room, she lit it up. Just the sight of her on a dreary day could make everything better. Her fair skin and golden hair looked like it was birthed from a sunny spring day. In my eyes, she was perfection.

We knew we could never have children. Instead, we focused our energy on making our way to Antarctica, and we managed to get in before it was locked down. Together we spent a month building our yurt, literally our first and last home together. It wasn’t very large, roughly the size of an average suburban living room. But it had everything we needed to live comfortably, and we had our leftover military rations to keep us reasonably well fed. At first it was almost like an extended wilderness adventure; living in a hut on the tundra, but after the first year it grew monotonous. Most of our days were spent exploring the area around the Ross Mountains, discovering what had bloomed in the tundra, and watching the flora and fauna that now flourished where there had once only been glaciers.

We were fortunate that the glaciers were mostly fresh water ice. When they melted, it created several large lakes which contained enough fresh water to allow us to survive. We weren’t sure how long the fresh water would exist, it would eventually boil off when the it got close enough, but the remaining humans in the area, including us, should be dead by then.

**********

Three weeks ago Sunshine started developing tiny, painful sores on her lovely fair skin. I’m lucky (if you want to call it luck), I’m of Mediterranean lineage, the type that some people used to call swarthy, so my complexion is a bit more tolerant of sun than hers is. I’ve never had a sunburn, I just get really tan during what used to be the summer months.

Two weeks ago, her tiny red sores started growing into larger red sores with a bullseye of red skin around them. The only thing that we had that remotely resembled medical supplies was some petroleum jelly, so once a day I applied a small amount in hopes that it would help ease the pain. It seemed to, slightly, but I also knew that this could be a long event for her, so I wanted to save as much as I could. I also knew that very soon, with the final mega-dose of radiation approaching, I too would be developing sores and dealing with the pain that she is. There’s a part of me that selfishly hopes that there will be at least a little petroleum jelly left so that I can apply some to my own sores. I can’t believe that my mind went there, but it did. But for now, though, my focus is on Sunshine.

**********

Three days ago, she asked me to end it for her. Out of the blue, with no warning. The sores, which I now officially considered lesions, were growing on a daily basis. Her beautiful fair skin had taken on a reddish hue, like a slight sunburn from a day on the beach. I too was developing a few tiny spots that I knew would soon be full blown sores that would continue to develop just like hers had. I didn’t look forward to that happening, so I just tried to ignore it as much as I could.

If we weren’t constantly exposed to growing levels of radiation, I think she probably would have healed in a few weeks. But each spin of the Earth, each time it rotated so that this part of Antarctica was sunny, put us right in the radiation blast as the Earth’s protective layers were stripped away by the added gravity of the dark star. We were at the point that the shade of the Ross Mountains no longer helped.

I dismissed her request. There was no way I was going to end it for her. I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t going to be able to kill my Sunshine. 

But could I let her continue to suffer, knowing that the only relief for her was to die? And that was going to happen naturally (if you can call this mess natural) in a few days anyway?

She finally fell into a fitful sleep, and I sat in my chair and watched her breath move her chest. At least now she wasn’t aware of the pain. If only she could continue to stay sleeping until the end. That would be the best thing that could happen, but I knew that was unrealistic. I finally fell asleep in the chair for a few hours.

**********

When I woke, she was staring at me, her beautiful blue eyes still held their sparkle despite the pain that she was in. I looked at my own arms and realized that the spots had grown while I slept, they were the size of pinheads when I went to sleep, and now they were the size of a pencil eraser.

I gently kissed her forehead and sat on the edge of the bed next to her. I picked up her hand and held it in mine, I just wanted to sit with her. But she had other ideas.

She asked me if I had reconsidered. I told her no, I was not going to kill her. She asked me why I wanted to see her continue to suffer, especially since she would die a painful death very soon. Even though it would end her suffering, I would probably condemn my own soul to eternal damnation, if there is such a thing.

She continued to ask me why I wouldn’t do it. Damn. I could never argue with her. I told her no again, but I was not as firm, not as forceful as I had been a few minutes ago, and she picked up on that. She knew she had me over the proverbial barrel. I was weakening, and she exploited my weakness. She knew that if she kept working, my resolve would be eroded, and in the end, she’d have her way. She has always been that way, always been able to see directly into my soul and know what I was going to do before I did. I both loved and hated that about her.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong. I really did try to argue the point. I asked her if the situation were reversed, could she do the same thing for me? She said that was a strawman argument. I had no idea what a strawman argument was, but it sounded really brainy. And not only is she beautiful, but she’s also extremely smart. Smarter than I am, which, in the end, is why she got her way.

**********

I still have blood on my hands. Her blood. I tried to wash it off, but there is precious little water left. I briefly thought that I better get it cleaned up, or they were sure to figure out that I was the one that killed her. But then I realized that there is no more they. No matter what I do, no matter what I’ve done, there is no one left to care. I decided to strip my clothing off and spend the rest of my life naked. There’s no one to know or give a damn.

The sun has lost all of its ability to warm the planet, and the first and final snow of the season continues to fall outside my window. As I watch the sky, I realize that there is something there. Something in addition to the sun and that damn dark star. Something…something that is growing closer. Maybe it’s the end that I’m seeing growing close.

It’s a ship. Not of human design. Not really a full-size ship, but more of a shuttle. It lands about a hundred yards away, and the side of the ship slides open, and three humans step out into the snow, followed by an alien.

I hear their voices as they approach. The humans are from the Divinity ships. They must have found help and returned to rescue the few of us that are left on Earth. They open the door of my yurt and one of the humans walks toward me and explains that they’re here to take me with them. To take me and the few other survivors off the planet and to our new home.

And I suddenly realize that didn’t have to kill her.

I begin to scream.